Chapter 12

Aspects of narrative in series and serials

Rosemary Huisman

One understanding of postmodern style is that of fragmentation. What is frag-

mented, broken up, will depend on what is usually understood to have ‘coherence’
in a particular medium and discourse. In poetry a postmodern style can be read
as a dispersal of the unified persona of the traditional lyric; in prose fiction, such
as the novel, it could be an incoherence of character, event or setting. (Is that the
same character? Has this event already happened? I don’t understand!)
The Hollywood tradition of film narrative has on the whole pursued the
tight coherence of the nineteenth-century classic realist novel (the American
D. W. Griffith, producer and director of the much-studied 1915 film, The Birth
of a Nation, was said to have been very influenced by Dickens’ novel structure). In
comparison, the smaller European markets have allowed more aesthetic freedom.
European films offer examples of narrative disruption from the earliest period,
from the surreal distortion of setting in the German film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
(1919) to the ambiguity of character and event in the French film, Last Year at
Marienbad (1961). For film, greater aesthetic freedom, relative to economic con-
straints, can favour experimentation, including various types of fragmentation.
But in contrast, for television, it is the very economic constraints within which
it is produced that oblige the television product to be fragmented in particular
ways. These ways have led to the series and the serial being the dominant modes
of narration in television.

Series and serials

The following definitions are derived from the glossary of the Archival Moving
Image Materials of the United States Library of Congress:

153
154 Television: narratives and ideology

A television series is a group of programs created or adapted for television broad-

cast with a common series title, usually related to one another in subject or
otherwise. Often, television series appear once a week during a prescribed time
slot; however, they may appear with more or less frequency. Television series are
usually created to be open-ended, not with a predetermined number of episodes.
In a fiction series, the programs typically share the same characters and basic
theme.
(www.itsmarc.com/crs/arch0391.htm; viewed 6 November 2004)

A series can be on any subject matter, fiction or non-fiction, such as the series
Walking with Dinosaurs, or the various history series on Britain, World War II and
so on. Fictional series typically introduce and complete a new story of events in
one episode, although various threads or storylines, such as relationships between
the regular characters, can develop from one episode to the next. Think of Friends
or Ally McBeal, for example.
A television serial is ‘a group of programs with a storyline continued from
episode to episode’ (www.itsmarc.com/crs/arch0946.htm; viewed 6 November
2004). The Archival Moving Image Materials resource tells us that film serials
had been very popular (‘The serial engaged audience interest in a hero or hero-
ine whose exploits reached an unresolved crisis at the end of each episode’), but
their production ceased in the early 1950s, just as television sets became more
widely available. This suggests the role in popular entertainment that television
was beginning to assume.
The film serial typically had a finite number of episodes, and featured television
serials can similarly have a finite number; in any one of its three seasons, the serial
24 (2003–), in which each hourly episode was equated with an hour of real time
for the characters, had – surprise! – twenty-four episodes. However, a feature
of television serials, which derived from radio serials, is the development of the
open-ended serial, which will go on for as long as audience interest and advertising
support endure. This is characteristic of the genre of soap operas, discussed in
chapter 13.
A program can change its nature over time. Early episodes of the British police
drama, The Bill, belonged to a series. Each episode had a self-contained plot,
often one serious storyline and one more humorous one (an element of the sitcom
genre), and by the end of the episode each new storyline was complete: the crime
solved, the kitten found. As Anne Dunn has shown (in chapter 10), the emphasis
in these earlier episodes was on the actions of the police; the characterisation
of individual police remained fairly static. More recent episodes have developed
storylines concerning the personal lives of the police: romantic triangles, ani-
mosity between individuals and so on (plot elements more associated with the
soap opera genre). This focus led to more storyline continuity between episodes,
with the romantic triangle storyline, continuing from one episode to the next,
 Aspects of narrative in series and serials 155

becoming as prominent as the solving crime storyline, complete in one episode.

In a further development of The Bill, a limited number of episodes can become
a full serial, with interwoven storylines (for example, a sequence of six episodes
centred both on the pursuit of a serial rapist and on the place of a policewoman
in a traditional male police culture).

Models of communication

An old-fashioned model of communication simply described a sender who sent

a message to an addressee (listener or reader). Michael Reddy called this the
‘conduit model’ because it assumed that language is a kind of conduit, or container,
through which information or meaning is passed from one person to another. In
fact, all that is passed from one person to another is a signal (the vehicle of a
Peircean sign) – a disturbance of air waves or marks on the page or digital dots
on a screen – that signifies a meaning to the sender (is understood as a sign that
implies an interpretant that signifies a known object) according to their particular
context of production, and which might or might not signify a meaning to the
addressee: have you travelled in a country where you do not speak the language?
And if the signal is interpreted as meaningful, that interpretation might or might
not be similar to that intended by the sender (Reddy 1979: 284–324).
The addressee interprets according to their context of reception; in personal
encounters, to the extent that the social knowledge and experience of the sender
and addressee overlap, communication is reasonably successful, although we can
never be sure we have understood ‘what’s in the other person’s mind’ (as the
conduit model assumed). But with mass media, such as television, the commu-
nication model becomes even more complex. The sender we might now call the
agency – and that agency is itself complex, made up of a collaboration of many
contributors, with varying degrees of power over the final ‘product’, the program.
The addressee is now the audience – but this is a twofold concept. There is the
audience that the agency projects, the one it would like to attract: I will call this
the illocutionary audience (appropriating the term ‘illocution’ from speech act
theory, where it denotes the intended meaning of the speaker). The other audi-
ence is the actual audience who chooses to watch the program: I will call this the
perlocutionary audience (again, ‘perlocution’ is the term from speech act the-
ory for the meaning that the listener ‘takes up’). Members of the perlocutionary
audience do not of course necessarily ‘take up’ the same or similar interpretation.
Some film analysis would use the term ‘speaking subject’ for both agency and
perlocutionary audience – those who produce meaning or those who interpret
it – so media texts have a proliferation of ‘speaking subjects’. (The term ‘spoken
subject’ is then apt for the illocutionary audience – the position of interpretation
prepared or projected by the producers of a media text.)
156 Television: narratives and ideology

Finally there is the signal itself, the media text of a program, such as an episode
of a series or serial, which is created and broadcast. Its producers will try to give it
characteristics that satisfy economically proven criteria, but there is no guarantee
of audience response. Remember, the meaning is understood by the viewer in their
own context of reception – there is no meaning ‘in’ the signal itself. Moreover, as
N. J. Lowe points out,

when we watch a film or a television program, we are processing not one nar-
rative track but two. There is the visual text on the screen, and there is the
soundtrack separately assembled, often by different people, and lovingly pasted
together to create the impression of unity, but it is our ‘reading’ of the film that
actually connects and collates the two.
(Lowe 2000: 25)

Agency: the contexts of production

‘Agency’ refers to one causing an action, here the production of a media text for
television. But this agency is complex as it includes the collaboration of many
individuals. It is impossible to identify ‘an agent’ in the way we are accustomed
to do, for example, in the author of the traditional novel (although, even with
the novel, the contribution of a good editor can be very important, even if not
acknowledged). In all this variety, there are two dimensions of agency that must
be taken into account: first, the agency as ‘creative activity’ and, second, the agency
as a television company or organisation.
The agency as ‘creative activity’ includes the scriptwriter(s), director, photog-
raphers, actors, editors and so on – all those concerned with directly producing
the television program we eventually see. Most of the credits at the beginning or
end of a program acknowledge people involved in creative agency. The agency as
a television company or organisation is depicted by the very first and very last
shots of a program, which identify the company in image and language – for
example, for the series Seinfeld, the first credit is the familiar Columbia image of
the woman holding a torch aloft, just as an MGM production has the roaring lion
or a Paramount production the mountain with stars above. As the second-last
credit for Seinfeld we see the words ‘A West/Schapiro Production in association
with’, followed by the final credit, ‘Castle Rock Entertainment’, with the image
associated with that company, a lighthouse and its sweeping beam. Presumably
these are the smaller companies to which the larger Columbia company contracts
the production of this particular program.
The agency of the television company encompasses both how it is organised
internally and how it is governed externally by rules and laws, such as the reg-
ulations of government bodies that control the media. This television company
agency is the primary agency, in that the pressures, both internal and external,
 Aspects of narrative in series and serials 157

generated and experienced by the company will be the context within which
the other agency, of creative activity, can take place. Thus it is no accident that
the first and/or last credits of a program describe this agency – the position in the
program sequence symbolises the company’s dominant enclosure of the creative
activity.
To repeat: agency in the production of television texts is complex. The list
of credits on a television program shows how many individuals are involved in
production decisions and actions. I noted the credits for an episode of the comedy
series Seinfeld (that is, the credits for creative agency, in between the company
identifiers previously mentioned). If you saw any episodes of this show, you’ll
know it was relatively simple – a good script, four regular actors, all very good
comedians, and a few star guests – so if anything this is a more limited list than
more complicated productions would require. Of course, the same person may
perform more than one of these functions:

Credits at the beginning of the episode – one name for each function, unless otherwise
indicated:
In separate sequence, the names of the four regular actors, then
Producer
Supervising producer
Executive producer
Created by (two)
Written by
Directed by

Credits at the end

Executive producer (not the same as the executive producer at the beginning)
Executive producers (two)
Producer (not the same as the producer at the beginning)
Co-producer
Story editor
Program consultant
Line producer
Associate producer
Guest starring (three)
Also starring (two)
Production designer
Unit production manager/first assistant director
Second assistant director
Casting by (a company/agency name)
Director of photography
Music by
Edited by
158 Television: narratives and ideology

Production coordinator
Script supervisor
Production mixer
Set decorator
Property master
Costume supervisor
Key grip
Online editor
Colourist
Technical coordinator
Camera operators (three)
Production accountant
Assistant accountant
Make-up (two)
Hair stylists (two)
Writer’s assistants (two)
Assistant to the producer
Production assistants (two)
Executive in charge of production

What this list demonstrates is that creative agency – by which meanings are made –
is complex and multivocal in television texts, involving far more than the writers
(or ‘authors’) themselves.
Here’s one writer commenting on the experience of writing for a television
series:

The tube is death on writers. Especially television series work. It rots talent at
an astounding rate . . . the real culprit is the demand for speed and repetition.
You’re writing as part of a team – often with five or six other writers. And you’re
labouring within strict formulas for the show’s characters and plots. It’s like
making Pintos at the Ford plant; you stamp out the body [with lots of help] and
somebody else puts in the headlight. And you’re doing it fast: 14 days is luxury
for about 45 pages of dialogue.
(www.pubinfo.vcu.edu/artweb/playwriting; viewed 6 September 2002)

This context of situation is very different from that assumed in a romantic

understanding of the writer as an inspired novelist (or poet), where narrative
coherence in the production of the text is assumed to derive from the author’s
individual identity. The coherence in production in a media text written in these
circumstances will typically derive not from any individual, but from the collective
agreement by the different writers in following conventions already established
for this series or serial, for example in genre and characterisation.
 Aspects of narrative in series and serials 159

The online Wikipedia entry for ‘Television program’ has an illuminating account
of ‘the standard procedure for shows on network television in the United States’.
Here is a summary (the italics are in the entry):
r The show creator comes up with the idea for a series. The idea includes the
concept, the characters, perhaps some crew, perhaps some ‘big-name’ actors.
r The creator pitches the idea to different television networks.
r An interested network orders a pilot (a prototype first episode of the series).
r The structure and team of the whole series is put together to create the pilot.
r The network likes the pilot, it picks up the show, it orders a run of episodes (the
network doesn’t like the pilot, it passes; the creator shops the pilot around to
other networks).
r The show hires a stable of writers; they might write in parallel (one writer on
the first episode, another on the second and so on) or they might work as a
team (as in the disgruntled quote given above). ‘Sometimes [writers] develop
story ideas individually, and pitch them to the show’s creator, who then folds
them together into a script and rewrites them.’
r The executive producer (often the creator) picks crew and cast (subject to
approval by the network), approves and often writes series plots, sometimes
writes and directs major episodes. Other subordinate producers, variously
named, ensure that the show works smoothly.
r The written script must be turned into film, with both language and image.
This is the director’s job: deciding how to stage scenes, where to place cameras,
perhaps to coach actors. A director is appointed for each episode.
r A director of photography controls the lighting and ‘takes care of making the
show look good’.
r An editor cuts the different pieces of film together, adds music, puts the whole
show together with titles and so on. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television
series; 12 October 2004)
Obviously, a media text produced through the interaction of so many people
will be very expensive, as will a film. However, films sell seats to individuals,
but commercial television sells viewers to advertisers. If the series can attract
a large viewing audience, then advertisers will want to buy time during its
episodes, and the television station showing it can charge a premium rate dur-
ing its time slot. If the series is not successful, and therefore cancelled, the net-
work has not only lost money in its development but also still has to gamble on
bankrolling new ‘pitches’. So narrative in television series and serials will be
very different from that in texts of print culture and in film, as economic factors
place three (at least) constraints on television narrative from the perspective of
agency:
r the risk of investing leads to a conservative attitude to creative production, with
great reliance on narrative conventions already established as successful; the
latter also facilitates the preparation of scripts by teams, rather than individual
authors;
160 Television: narratives and ideology

r the structure of the narrative of the individual program episode has to accom-
modate the interpolation of advertising texts within the episode as it goes to
air;
r television narratives will preferably be open-ended (resist closure) and repeti-
tive so that, if successful, they can be continued.

The perlocutionary (actual) audience

As described above, the commercial television company must regularly interrupt

a fictional narrative to broadcast advertisements. For example, for three half-hour
episodes of the sitcom series Seinfeld, I noted that the sitcom content in fact took
just over an hour; that is, about ten minutes of each half-hour episode – one-third
of the viewing time – had been taken up with advertisements.
Viewers know – or at least feel – that the more popular the program, the more it
is fragmented by advertisements and the more advertisements are in each adver-
tising segment. In an episode of the popular action serial 24, shown from 8.30pm
to 9.30pm, I counted five sequences of advertisements between program seg-
ments, and in each sequence there were ten or eleven different advertisements for
a diverse list of ‘products’. This diversity reflects the network’s assumption that
mid-evening is a prime time for advertising to the widest demographic of viewers.
For example, the 9pm advertisement segment contained advertisements for: All
Saints (a television network series), Oz lotto (lottery), Triple X (film), Mitsubishi
(car company), HCF (health insurance company), Claratyne (hay fever product), a
job search agency, SPC baked beans, a home loan company, Optus mobile phones
and Marshall Law (a network series).
Why does the television viewer tolerate this fragmented narrative? In fact, it
is generally compatible with the context of reception in which television is usu-
ally experienced, that is, a private home. This is a very different context from the
experience of film in the cinema, where the viewer has paid to sit (quietly! other
patrons hope) in the dark in a public space. For television, viewing is likely to
be interrupted by various domestic demands and behaviour: the phone call, the
break for preparing food, the calls of nature. Viewers ‘channel-surf’, leave a pro-
gram and perhaps return. More recently, viewers have had the capacity to tape
programs and view them later, fast-forwarding over the advertising segments. Cur-
rent developments in digital technology are increasingly empowering viewers to
select when and how they watch programs.
Non-commercial stations, such as the ABC in Australia and the BBC in
Britain, transmit a television narrative continuously (although increasingly, adver-
tisements for the ABC’s own programs and bookshop products are scheduled
between completed programs or episodes). Noticeably, the non-commercial chan-
nels feature short, two- to six-part serials, whose scripts often originate in nov-
els (typically historical or crime). This construction makes different demands
 Aspects of narrative in series and serials 161

on the viewer, who must ‘commit’ continuous time to viewing in a way more
comparable to the reader’s ‘committing’ continuous time to the reading of a
novel.

The illocutionary (assumed or projected) audience

The principal concern of the television network or station is: how can we attract
the audience which will attract advertisers to us? Television and advertising com-
panies know there is not one homogeneous audience but the possibility of vari-
ous audiences and various responses. Obviously advertising companies will do
audience (market) research before doing the creative design for a particular con-
sumer product. However, in commercial television (as for magazines, discussed
in chapter 18), what is advertising and what is editorial seep into each other’s
area: in order to attract and maintain a high advertising revenue, a station needs
to broadcast programs that appeal to an audience similar to that wanted by major
advertising sponsors. To do this they need to ask, at least: what is the nature of
the target audience, and what is the audience positioning strategy?
Studies of the target audience can be demographic or psychographic. The for-
mer is the familiar segmenting of the population primarily by occupation, which is
assumed to relate to spending power; thus the highest category is senior manage-
rial, administrative or professional, while the second lowest is semi-skilled and
unskilled manual workers. In Australia, for example, the non-commercial ABC
and the multilingual SBS are usually said to attract a demographic with higher
levels of education and so in higher-level occupations, while the commercial sta-
tions appeal to a wider cross-section of the community, and have larger audiences
overall.
The ABC’s original charter with public funding was to provide news, current
affairs, comment and ‘culture’; every so often a new general manager tries to
extend the demographic appeal and compete with the commercial channels for
viewers. This socially admirable intent is a goal not necessarily compatible with
the ABC’s traditionally strong orientation to information as well as entertainment
and its tendency to be more innovative in encouraging those with creative agency.
The looser link with market pressures does help to explain the more variable
spread of media texts, including series and serials, presented on the ABC and
SBS, both those locally commissioned and those purchased from elsewhere. In a
loose generalisation, one could say the ABC purchases more programs from the
BBC in the UK, the commercial channels purchase more programs from the USA,
while SBS shows programs, especially films, from many non-English-speaking
countries, with English subtitles. (Commercial stations have a practical difficulty
in buying BBC rather than American sitcoms; BBC sitcoms are made half an hour
long, whereas a commercial sitcom is about twenty-two minutes long, allowing
for the inclusion of advertising segments in the scheduled half hour.)
162 Television: narratives and ideology

The second kind of audience analysis, the study of psychographic variables,

has become more popular in recent years. Here the population is segmented by
lifestyle aspirations. Theories of identity are important in this kind of analysis: the
idea is that an individual with a dominant psychovariable of one kind will identify
more readily with a television advertisement or program which represents or
endorses that category. If you have watched episodes of the Australian soap opera
Home and Away, you might decide, as I did, that its target audience is adolescents
in secondary school, with experience principally limited to that of family and local
community (as indeed its title declares). On the other hand, the American serial 24
was targeted at a wider range of audience identification, with principal characters
who were young and middle-aged, white and black, with strong female roles,
although centred on the traditional white male character, Jack Bauer. And finally,
the series Sex and the City, with its focus on female sex and fashion, targeted the
post-adolescent urban female consumer. The mode of address of each program is
tailored to fit the illocutionary (assumed) audience: characters are given dialogue
which is assumed to be that with which such an audience can identify (both in
subject matter of interest and in ‘realistic’ interaction between characters).
The programming schedule of the three programs just mentioned, in 2002
in Sydney, Australia, indicates the target audience judgement of the television
channel: 7 to 7.30pm every evening for Home and Away (a similar demographic
can catch the soap Neighbours on a rival channel in the previous half hour), prime
time 8.30pm to 9.30pm for 24 (twice a week in the early episodes to ‘hook’ viewers,
once a week thereafter), and once a week, a two-hour slot from 9.30pm to 11.30pm
for two episodes of Sex and the City, the first a new episode, the second a repeat
for recent converts or addicts.
Another way to identify the likely target audience of a program is to take note
of the advertisements filmed in its breaks – the advertisements and the program
(the network hopes) are aimed at the same target audience. An example of the
number and diversity of advertisements aimed at a wide demographic viewing in
prime time was given above for the serial 24.
In trying to position the audience, those with agency are most directly trying
to act upon the perceptions of the viewer. Audience positioning can refer just to
the physical construction of the media text by those with creative agency. In film
studies, the term ‘spoken subject’ is sometimes used for the position of the cam-
era, the viewing position prepared for the individual viewer. But by metaphorical
extension, the term ‘spoken subject’ can also be used of the ideological position
prepared for the viewer. (Typically, commercial agency favours the ideological sta-
tus quo, since in a society that perceives itself as stable, commercial stability is
more favoured.) ‘Modes of address’ can serve this ideological purpose. As Sonia
M. Livingstone has written: ‘texts attempt to position readers as particular kinds
of subjects through particular modes of address’ (Livingstone 1994: 249).
But a viewer can be compliant or resistant. I was a resistant viewer of the
following: in the Home and Away episodes I watched, the mother appeared to
 Aspects of narrative in series and serials 163

me to be a classic ‘pour-oil-on-troubled-waters’ stereotype, trying to placate a

troubled adolescent daughter and a belligerent and irrational father. To explore
my response, I made a quick analysis of the mother’s dialogue in two sequential
scenes (the husband or daughter speak between the numbered utterances):

(With husband, in house)

1 Can’t you go a bit easier on her? You know what she’s going through.
2 The way you’re acting, you’re going to drive her further away.
3 I know she put us through hell in the last few weeks, but that doesn’t mean
she deserves to go through hell. Our daughter’s in pain, Rhys. At least try to
understand that.

(With daughter, in backyard)

1 Oh, sweetheart.
2 Your dad doesn’t mean to be so hard on you – he’s just – he’s just finding it
difficult seeing you this unhappy.
3 Oh, I know it doesn’t feel like it now, but you will feel good about yourself
again – without Kane. I want you to make a deal with me – OK? I want you to
write down all the good things that happened to you during the day, and at the
end of the day I want you to count them all up. Please, Kirsty. There are good
things in your life right here and now. You just have to be on the lookout for
them. I bet you won’t be able to count them on one hand.

I’ve italicised each instance of the mother as grammatical subject. In each of

the six examples the associated verb realises a mental process (two ‘I know’, three
‘I want’ and one ‘I bet’; that is, ‘I imagine’), but there are no verbs of material
processes of action. So in the social world projected by her speech, the mother
thinks but does not act at all. Her language choice is placatory: with her daughter
she tactfully avoids the power role of direct commands – not ‘Write down all the
good things . . .’, but ‘I want you to write down . . .’ – and her one direct command
to her husband is that he attempt a mental process, ‘try to understand’. The very
script in these two scenes inscribes a particular ideology of ‘family values’: the
mother as thinking of the needs of others but not effective in initiating her own
actions.
Effective, efficient – such terms seem to be important in the ideology of power
relations portrayed on television. George Gerbner made an interesting early analy-
sis of violence in television narratives. (His studies, published in 1970, are
described in Fiske and Hartley 2003: 15–21.) Gerbner concluded that heroes and
villains were more or less equally violent, but that heroes were ‘more efficiently
violent’. (They were also more physically attractive.) ‘Cool efficiency, and, to a
lesser extent, manliness and youth, appear to be the chief correlates of success
and virtue in a fairly impersonal self-seeking and specialised structure of violent
action’ (Fiske & Hartley 2003: 19).
164 Television: narratives and ideology

The relevance of this to ideology is that Gerbner does not see violence on tele-
vision as a direct representation of the extent and nature of violence itself in
society, but rather as a symbolic representation of ‘the value-structure of society’:

violence . . . is used in the pursuit of the socially validated ends of power, money
or duty . . . So despite its obvious connection with power or dominance over
others, it is not the dominance of one personality over another, but of one social
role over another social role. It is linked to socio-centrality, in that the victims
are likely to belong to less esteemed groups, defined in terms of age, class, gender
and race, and the successful aggressors are likely to be young, white, male and
middle-class or unclassifiable. Violence is not in itself seen as good or evil, but
when correlated with efficiency it is esteemed, for efficiency is a key socio-central
value in a competitive society.
(Fiske & Hartley 2003: 19–20)

It is worth remembering that this study was carried out before 1970, and we need
to consider whether its conclusions are still relevant.

The media text – series and serials

At the end of the section on agency, I described three characteristics of television

narrative that economic constraints frequently would impose. These are:
r the risk of investing leads to a conservative attitude to creative production,
with great reliance on narrative conventions already established as successful
(narrative repetition within the episode);
r the structure of the narrative of the individual program episode has to accom-
modate the interpolation of advertising texts within the episode as it goes to
air (narrative segmentation);
r series and serials will preferably resist closure and be open-ended; for budgetary
reasons the company prefers to find a successful formula for a program, then
repeat that formula (narrative repetition between episodes).
Given the circumscriptions described above, the production of narrative coher-
ence in a television program is a conscious construction, and therefore explicit
and established codes of television production are likely to be followed – and
repeated. These codes will include:
r an ideology (an assumed understanding of social values)
r an established television genre or text type
r the typical field, tenor and mode of that genre (see below)
r conventional narrative deployment of character, action, dialogue, setting/
location, mise en scène/iconography
r the use of technical conventions of televisual construction
r the use of recognised units of televisual text construction in editing.
 Aspects of narrative in series and serials 165

The next chapter will make a more detailed study of ideology and narrative
deployment in relation to the genre of sitcom (an example of a series) and the
genre of soap opera (an example of a serial). Here we consider the analysis of
genre in terms of field, tenor and mode and, more briefly, the codes of tech-
nical construction and the units of televisual text construction for television
narrative.

Genre: field, tenor and mode

A genre is a recognised text type. The financial constraints within which televi-
sion texts are produced promote a structuralist understanding of texts, including
narrative texts, by producers. This refers to the attempt to define and reproduce
the characteristics of previously successful texts. Whether or not producers have
much insight into their own ideology of production (apart from a general sense of
being conservative, not ‘rocking the boat’), they will be very clear on the category
of text – the genre, that they want to produce. Chapter 10 discussed genres of
television. Here I elaborate on the description of genres in terms of field, tenor
and mode as a way of structuring our analysis of genre. These terms are derived
from a model of the context of situation, as used in systemic functional linguistics
(Halliday & Hasan 1985: 12–14; Halliday 1978: 142–5).
Field can have two dimensions. The first is the field of social action. For nar-
ration in television, these are (in Aristotle’s sense) the two social acts of telling
(diegesis) and showing (mimesis). The viewer is shown characters doing actions,
and shown interactions between characters, including conversations. But who
‘shows’? Watching a game of football as you sit in the grandstand is not the same
as watching a game of football being broadcast on television. The latter has cam-
era angles chosen and is broken into the usual segments for advertisements; ‘real
time’ is stopped for replays of highlights, even during the first transmission. The
football game is being ‘structured’ to fit the exigencies of television production.
All images seen on television are mediated, even if the agency of that mediation
appears effaced. Even more patently, a fictional narrative, such as a sitcom or soap
opera, is structured; the apparent showing of the characters and events effaces
the narrator, who ‘tells’ what is ‘shown’. The possible effects of this effacement
will be discussed later.
The second dimension of field is that of subject matter. This is the one we
readily understand, and is the usual content of television program guides. Here is
an extract from a soap magazine section, ‘Your complete guide to what’s coming
up’, for the soap opera Days of Our Lives. It is headed ‘Dream Cheater’: ‘Carrie
gets emotional as she and Austin are about to make love. The next day Austin
says they can wait until they’re ready to try for a family. As he watches her sleep,
she dreams of making love to Mike instead of her husband.’ (TV Soap (Australia),
12 August 2002, p. 33.)
166 Television: narratives and ideology

Tenor refers to social relations and social attitudes. We can describe a tenor
in relation to each field. The first dimension of field, that of social action, for
narrative media texts such as the sitcom and soap opera, was telling, includ-
ing effaced telling. (In print culture narratives, such as the novel, this tenor is
usually realised by a clause choice of the declarative mood in statements.) The
tenor in relation to this field is the relation between the producer of the sit-
com or soap opera and the audience. Complications multiply! I spoke of the
illocutionary audience – the one the producers aim to attract using the results
of market research. So the illocutionary tenor is the relationship the producers
aim to achieve between the television network agency and the target viewing
audience; it is a power relation of teller and projected compliant viewer. The
perlocutionary tenor will of course refer to any relationship a viewer actually
interprets.
Again, it is easier to describe the tenor of the second-order field, the subject
matter of the fictional world (the diegesis in Genette’s sense), since this refers to
the social relations between the characters and their attitudes to what is going
on, as revealed both in their dialogue and actions, and the social roles assigned
to them. However, the postmodern stylistic features of television narrative (its
segmented and non-linear features), together with its usual private context of
reception, work to undermine (deconstruct) this nice opposition of tenor asso-
ciated with the first-order field and tenor associated with the second-order field.
Television has been described as having ‘permeable diegetic boundaries’: that is,
the boundaries between the first-order world of the viewer and the second-order
world depicted on the television screen (whether in a segment of narrative fiction
or a segment of advertising) can become blurred. In the fiction, the characters
address each other; in the advertising, the speakers usually appear directly to
address the viewer (as newsreaders always appear to do).
This discussion of tenor highlights an important difference between television
and film, which has been described as ‘oral interaction versus gaze’. One online
account of television narrative puts it like this:

TV presents itself as discourse (acknowledging speaker and listener) rather than

as story/history (which hides the source of enunciation so that it seems to happen
all by itself), and all of its stories are framed by its ‘superdiscourse’ of scheduling.
This discursivity mimics oral culture, yet structures it into a rigid form. It also
works to draw us into the industry’s presentation of social meanings and to
present them as a consensus. Through the device of direct address, an illusion
of actual contact is created which works in TV’s interest and promotes certain
ideologies. But just as cinema only presents the illusion of history (it does really
have a source and is artificially created), TV gives only the illusion of discourse
(we don’t see the real source and it isn’t real conversation).
(www.brown.edu/Departments/MCM/courses/MC11/outline/
TV narrative outline.htm; 14 October 2004)
 Aspects of narrative in series and serials 167

This aspect of television, that much of it is scripted and produced to be presented

as interactive conversation, is a feature of mode, the organisation of the message.
The mode is designed to promote the conflation of viewer’s world and viewed
world and the identification of the viewer with the values assumed in the tele-
vision product (both narrative and advertisement). The British sitcom, The Royle
Family, depicting the family slumped on the sofa in front of the telly, comment-
ing occasionally on the program as they munched or scratched, beautifully (or
horribly) played with the mirroring of mimesis and the telling of diegesis – which
world (viewer and viewed) was the reflection of which world?
So, finally, mode. ‘Mode’ refers to the organisation of the message so that it is
coherent with its context. Here is an example from spoken language: if you and
I had been talking about sitcoms in general, I might then say: ‘Yes, one sitcom
I guess everyone liked must be Fawlty Towers.’ On the other hand, if we had
already been talking about Fawlty Towers, and you asked what genre I thought
it was, I might say, ‘Oh, I think it’s a sitcom.’ In both examples what we were
already talking about (‘sitcom’ in the first example, ‘it’ for ‘Fawlty Towers‘ in the
second) comes earlier in my statement, whereas the words for the new information
(‘Fawlty Towers’ in the first example, ‘sitcom’ in the second) comes at the end of
my statement. The subject matter is similar in both my sentences, but they’re
differently organised so as to be coherent with our previous conversation. Given
the fragmentation of the television text, the role of the editor is very important
in organising the mode of the completed program – shots to scene, scenes to
segment, then segment to episode (these are units of narrative editing, discussed
later). The repetition of features from episode to episode of the same series also
constitutes a feature of mode. (It is not the features themselves but the fact of
their repetition that links the programs.)

Generic expectations

A genre can be defined in terms of different likely configurations of field, tenor

and mode, sometimes through the dominance of one or more of these parameters.
Fictional series can usually be differentiated by their subject matter or field: a
police drama, hospital drama, the inhabitants of a country town, of an urban
street. However, the genre of sitcom is primarily defined through its tenor in
relation to the first-order field, the effect on the viewer – as its very name (short
for ‘situation comedy’) tells us, it is designed to make its audience laugh, or at least
amuse them. The sitcom can therefore have a wide variety of subject matter. (With
a quite opposite emotional colour, the film genre of film noir is also understood
primarily through its tenor.) And some genres are noticeably defined by their
mode, the organisation of their structure: the musical is a traditional example.
The term ‘categorisation’ is sometimes used to refer to the prior experience of
media texts a viewer is assumed to have. This previous experience, it is assumed,
168 Television: narratives and ideology

has led the viewer to have certain expectations about media texts, including that
media texts fall into certain categories with fairly predictable characteristics. The
usual term for a recognisable media text type is ‘genre’, for example, the soap opera
genre. So if a viewer is told in pre-advertising that a particular new program is
a ‘soap opera’ then the viewer will bring generic expectations to that program.
They will, for example, be very surprised if the episodes turn out to be about a
lone man’s courageous battle to climb a lonely mountain: that is, about a single
individual struggling with nature rather than a social group agonising about their
relationships. Again, if the program does in fact turn out to have a soap opera
subject matter (field) but its camera shots are mostly long shots, with very few
close-ups of the face, the technical construction of the program will be generically
unusual, and the new viewer will probably find it a rather unsatisfactory program
in terms of usual generic expectations, because of the reduced visual intimacy
with the characters (the expected tenor).
From the point of view of agency, you can see that the choice of genre will have
been determined by the results of audience analysis in relation to the purpose of
the television network – a genre that market research has shown is attractive to
the demographic and/or psychographic profile of the desired audience. You can
also see why the two agencies might pull in different directions here: the cre-
ative agency – scriptwriter, director, costume designer and so on – might push
towards innovation and aesthetic originality, wanting to rework generic conven-
tions, whereas the very predictability of the genre serves the agency of the tele-
vision company. If all goes well, what worked last year will work this year. The
company agency, you might say, is best served by a fixed or structuralist approach
to narrative and genre: these are the narrative features of a soap, a sitcom, a cop
show/police drama – now go off and produce another one to the structuralist for-
mula. In contrast, the creative agency might incline more to a post-structuralist
perspective: let us deconstruct the past narrative structure of the genre, confound
the narrative expectations. In some ways, for example, the storyline of 24 tried
occasionally to do that – shockingly unpredictable events have occurred – but at
the same time the conventional ideology of the political thriller remains undis-
turbed, realised in a narrative in which the ultimate success of the hero brings
closure. Compare the ideological subversion of the plot of one late Agatha Christie
detective story, Cat among the Pigeons, in which the narrator of the novel turns
out to be the murderer. At the time that novel appeared, critical response ranged
from indignant to outraged!

Construction: technical codes

The technical conventions of televisual construction relate to the technology used

in filming the program: conventions of camera work, of lighting and colour, of
sound-recording. A list of the technical codes of visual construction could include
 Aspects of narrative in series and serials 169

shot size, camera angle, lens type, composition, focus, lighting codes and colour.
Particular techniques are assumed to signify a particular meaning to the illocu-
tionary (assumed) audience, but it is a structuralist assumption to relate a choice
of technique directly to a particular interpretation. There is no guarantee that the
viewer (a member of the perlocutionary audience) will take up this interpreta-
tion, although the more ‘literate’ (the more experienced) viewers are in televisual
conventions, the more likely they are to ‘read’ the technical codes in a socially
conventional way.
r The shot-size is associated with the continuum private/public – the close-up is
more intimate or more emotional than the more distant shot.
r The camera angle is associated with the continuum authority/weakness – the
camera looking up at the object gives the object a looming aspect.
r The lens type can give a dramatic effect (wide angle), an ‘everyday effect’ (nor-
mal) or a voyeuristic effect (telephoto).
r A symmetrical composition seems ‘calm’, a static composition seems to lack
conflict, while a dynamic composition signifies (it is assumed) disturbance and
disorientation.
r Soft focus is romantic.
r High key lighting signifies happiness, low key a sombre mood, high contrast in
lighting is dramatic, low contrast is realistic, documentary.
r Colour signifies optimism, passion, agitation with ‘warm’ colours (yellow, red,
orange, brown), pessimism, calmness, reason with ‘cool’ colours (blue, green,
purple, grey). (I have taken many of these terms from table 3.1 in Selby and
Cowdery 1995: 57, although I do not reproduce their Saussurean terminology.)
All the significations conventionally associated with the technical codes are
realisations of tenor: that is, interpreted as interpersonal meanings of social
relations and attitude. They do not tell us what the narrative is about, but
they are intended to suggest an attitude to the narrative. Remember, we cannot
at all assume that the perlocutionary audience will understand the technical
construction in these ways, but such codes would be part of studying televi-
sion camera techniques. And since particular genres might be characteristi-
cally realised by certain tenors, it is unsurprising that the camera techniques
taken to signify those tenors might become associated with certain genres. At
the same time, television genres are very permeable, so an action drama serial
like 24 nevertheless includes sequences of soap-like emotional ‘focus’, produced
through the technical close-ups on faces, which are thought to signify emotional
intensity.

Construction: units of narrative editing

In descending order of temporal duration (viewing time), we can identify tele-

visual units of text construction as
170 Television: narratives and ideology

r the series or serial

r the episode
r the segment
r the scene
r the shot.
The shot is the time in which one camera angle is held on the object. The
camera can zoom in or pull back (a zoom shot); the camera itself can move
while focused on the object (a tracking shot) or it can move so as to follow a
moving object or obtain a panoramic shot (a pan shot). Shots must be edited
into a scene, and there are practical constraints on the number of shots. For
example, the BBC writersroom guidelines say, ‘If you are writing a comedy to be
shot entirely on location, then try to avoid complicated set-ups. Studio shows use
four or five cameras. Location shows use one, and every angle has to be covered.
Look analytically at a sequence . . . and see how many shots go to make it up.’
(www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/writing/tvcomedy.shtml; 13 October 2004)
The scene is a sequence of shots in the same location. Conventionally, it signifies
a continuous action; a change in space or time means a change of scene. Scenes
must be edited into the segment. The segment is a sequence of scenes, which
is delimited by advertisements, making the segment the quintessential unit for
commercial television. For narratives produced for non-commercial television,
the segment is not marked externally by advertisements. It is recognised, in pro-
duction or reception, by the internal coherence of its field – staying with the same
topic or same characters, for example, rather like a paragraph in a printed text.
If there is a scheduled break in narrative transmission for some reason, the break
will be after a segment. Segments are edited into an episode. The episode is a
sequence of segments, into which the television network can interpose advertise-
ments. The series or serial will repeat basic features in each episode.
You already see the work that the viewer has to do, in order to interpret a coher-
ent narrative from this edited sequence, with its segmented transmission inter-
rupted by advertisements. This narrative ability with television input is learned
from experience, and is a skill comparable to the narrative literacy learned from
reading novels.
Any analysis of television narrative should pay particular attention to the seg-
ment, since it is one of the important ways in which television differs from film.
A segment does not need linear development. Each segment must be entertain-
ing on its own, almost a mini-episode; otherwise the viewer might not bother to
come back after the ‘commercial break’, or might have surfed to another chan-
nel with more interesting material. For series and serials this leads to a pastiche
model of narration, a very postmodern characteristic, in which several storylines,
centred on different characters and events, are juxtaposed, rather than one prin-
cipal storyline followed. (In this television is noticeably different from film, in
which a more linear development facilitates the focus on one ‘hero’s’ progress.)
In each segment each of these storylines will receive some but not a great deal of
 Aspects of narrative in series and serials 171

attention. The action serial 24 did this noticeably, moving several storylines for-
ward a little in each segment.
Soap opera is generically concerned more with characters’ reactions to events
rather than with the events themselves, so it might not move any ‘storyline’ for-
ward at all in any one segment. Each scene in the segment, typically the inter-
action of two characters, can reiterate (show again) the characters’ feelings
towards an already told event (or, in infinite regress, towards another character’s
attitude towards an already told event).

Conclusion

This chapter has defined series and serials in terms of producers, theorised as
‘agents’, and audiences, theorised as perlocutionary (actual) and illocutionary
(assumed or brought into being by the text). Interactions of agents and audiences
are closely related to the construction of genre, identified by aspects of field,
tenor and mode. Deployed in various ways, these in turn produce the generic
expectations that we use to categorise and decode new programs. The technical
codes of television narrative not only structure programs in familiar ways but also
work to naturalise or critique social relations and attitudes. Moving on from these
general points about series and serials, the next chapter will explore the particular
structures and techniques that define soap operas and sitcoms as generic types of
television narration.